By Neil Earle
Thursday, January 17, I was invited to a Fuller Seminary-sponsored kosher lunch where about sixty rabbis and pastors met to discuss “When Hollywood Meets Religion: Is There Common Ground?”
Fuller President Richard Mouw felt it was “historic” for people of faith to meet and cover what a healthy film industry could look like. Fuller largely founded the City of the Angels film festival in 1995 in large measure to “light a candle rather than curse the darkness” with the film industry almost on its doorstep.
Jeff Astrof, a producer and writer on such shows as “Friends” discussed what it was like being a Torah-observant Jew in a world where sit-coms are taped on Friday nights, his Sabbath. Jeff joked that the present writer’s strike was “the biggest walkout of Jews since Moses left Egypt.” David Kaufman of Hebrew Union College challenged the stereotype of “Jews running Hollywood” by showing how neutral Jewish-styled films from The Jazz Singer to Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters have been towards Judaism as such.
Jonathan Bock of Grace Hill Media added the Christian perspective by showing how he felt it important to run a dialogue with the film industry on The Da Vinci Code. “I didn’t mind doing this since I figured we had all the facts on our side,” he joked, “and when was the last time the Council of Nicea made it into a movie?”
Craig Detwiler of Fuller’s Reel Spirituality Institute entertained and enlightened by reviewing a min-history of film, of how church pastors in the 1905-1910 saw the movies as a way to preach the Gospel and keep kids off the streets. “In 1935, Hollywood accepted self-regulation via the Hays Code from the church lobbies because the Great Depression was kicking in. The result was the Golden Age of Hollywood,“ Craig added, “when films such as The Wizard of Oz, Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington made their debut.”
In World War Two Hollywood churned out propaganda films and people such as Ronald Reagan became stars playing wholesome American types. “Yet with the fear of Communism in the 1950s, much of the Hollywood talent that made pro-Russian films for the war effort was blacklisted. “This left a breach between the church and the movies that lasted from the 1950s down to the 1990s. Only recently with the success of such films as The Passion are both sides willing to take a second look.”
The issues are thus complex but few at the meeting thought boycotts were effective. All that does is underscore the importance of the movies in our culture.
So how about it? Is there any hope for Hollywood? I asked that in a national magazine in 1996 and the question is still a good one.
God is there in film though he is often Isaiah’s “God who hides himself” (Isaiah 45:15). The fine old hymn “This is my Father’s world” echoes theologian Paul Tillich’s pertinent point that such things as music, icebergs, and other phenomena are “messengers from another world.” I’d like to add the movies to that list.
Made in God’s image, we humans are, if I may stretch an analogy, a “chip off the old block.” Christians know that that image is warped and marred, sometimes monstrously so. But were we to take the challenge of Fuller adjunct Scott Young and engage in the “effort of appreciation” we might find things to praise in even the most unlikely secular films. After all, even in correcting the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 Jesus started with praise.
For openers, let’s review the movie that critics still list as the best American film ever made. Citizen Kane (1941) was a cinematic parable of the rise and fall of a larger-than-life figure, Charles Foster Kane. Dark lighting and innovative flashbacks accentuated the simple theme that moral choices have consequences. Kane’s ultimate ambition is thwarted by scandal. One message seems to be, “A man reaps what he sows.” Or consider Casablanca, 1943’s Academy Award winner. It would have fizzled if—in the end—the Bogart character had not sacrificed his chances for happiness with his true love and strolled off in the fog (with Claude Rains) to fight the Nazis. Overtones of “He that loses his life…” Perhaps.
In High Noon (1952) there’s no denying the riveting integrity of Gary Cooper’s character setting out to face his fate alone at the cost (apparently) of his wife, the devout Quaker played by Grace Kelly. Another 1950s Western, The Searchers (1956) with John Wayne, qualifies as an American epic of forgiveness. You never know what the Duke is going to do until the very end with his “turned-renegade” niece played by Natalie Wood. I once heard a tough Hollywood producer shed a tear over that one. The Apocalypse is a theme very much on God’s mind, it seems, and it gets comic treatment in 1964's “Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The film itself, with allusions to “doomsday machines” and realistic B-52 sequences, functions as a meta-parable of how even a horrific theme (nuclear war) can be explored through humor.
Humor? In Scripture? You don’t have to be scholar to enjoy the subtle comedy in “strain a gnat/swallow a camel” or the mini-burlesque of “children piping in the marketplace.” That last one seems to need gestures to be effective.
I didn’t see The Exorcist (1974) but certainly had fun teasing religious skeptics that after the radicalized 1960s (Time led with “Is God Dead?” in 1966) how surprising that so many were believers after all…in the Devil. (To be fair, the Sixties also gave us The Sound of Music in 1965 and A Man for All Seasons in 1966). But The Exorcist focused attention for Christian film-watchers as to how the movies were often standing alone in pop culture to remind us that absolute evil was alive and well on Planet Earth. This was continuing a 1930s trend (Dracula, 1931) which surfaced in the 1950s (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956) and certainly overreached with the teen slasher movies of the 1980s (A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984). The genre of apocalyptic evil is still alive, however (seen I Am Legend? and its surprising references to God).
Speaking of evil, what was Darth Vader but a high tech devil, complete with serpent-like death rattle, dark suit and all (Star Wars, 1977)? You’re smart enough to figure out the savior figures in the Lucas canon. And 2008 has already weighed in strongly with The Bucket List and its surprising discussions of death, purpose, belief, and intimations of immortality.
This quick sampling should take note of why so many theologians appear fascinated with that charter member of the Hollywood elite, Clint Eastwood. The star’s varying depictions of an avenging equalizer/“Angel of Death” figure in productions as diverse as Dirty Harry (1971) and High Plains Drifter (1973) shows how the theme of the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” style of justice is alive and well. If Justice lives can God be far behind?
This is but an introduction from a movie buff who is also a pastor to just hint at the redemptive possibilities in film. There is still too much sin in the cinema but neither, it seems, can the Creator be totally excised from the imaginations and consciences of his creation. There are still lots of movies I won’t see but by no means would I consider myself a boycotter. That just underscores how important the movies are even to those who won’t see them. And we might just lose the youth audience in the process.
Neil Earle is a church pastor, award-winning journalist, contributor to the Institute of Popular Culture’s Magazine Americana and Fuller alum (SOT-1998). His aunt and uncle lived next-door to a movie theater so he caught the disease at an early age.